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The academic year is ending pretty soon and students are probably starting to look for co-op jobs, so hey, why not throw some unsolicited resume advice at people?

First a quick disclaimer, I help review resumes now and then but I don’t have a huge amount of experience with it. Some of the stuff I’m going to tell you is stuff I’m really sure I’m right about, and some of it is just my opinion.

My first piece of advice, and the one I’m the most sure about, is proofreading. Proofread your resume! Put it away for a little while (at least a few days), and proofread it again! Get a friend to proofread it! Get your parents to proofread it! Go to your school’s career center and get them to proofread it! Wow, the word proofread looks really weird when you use it that much :)

But seriously, proofread! Why am I harping on that one so much? Because a resume with mistakes on it shows you aren’t good at fiddly little details. That’s a serious problem because programming is fiddly little details. Compilers and IDEs and syntax highlighting text editors can help you catch a lot of bugs, but they can’t catch logic errors for you. To find and fix logic errors, you have to pay really close attention to the code and keep track of every little detail. If your resume has mistakes, that makes me very worried that you’re going to struggle with programming in general and logic errors in particular and honestly, that’s going to make me very likely to set your resume aside. I say “very likely” because it is possible that if you had some really great projects on your resume I would still consider your resume, but you know, it’s a lot easier just to proofread the hell out of your resume :)

On top of making me worried about your ability to program, having mistakes on your resume just looks sloppy. That’s really not the first impression you want to make on a potential employer. In school it’s not as big of a deal if you lose a couple of points for having a typo or an autocorrect fail, but when you’re applying for a job that’s very likely to take your resume out of consideration entirely.

My next piece of advice is detail. Almost no one has too much detail on their resume, you basically can’t go wrong if you add more detail about exactly what you did, especially on projects you did as part of a team. When I’m looking at a resume, I want to know what you did. If you were involved in every part of the project, just say that instead of letting me wonder what you actually did. If you just did, say, the back end part of the project, say that! If I’m looking for a back end dev, I want to know if you have back end experience.

This one’s a little more subjective, but personally objectives on resumes take up space that could be used to tell me something more interesting. I mean, I know you want to work on software, it would be pretty dumb to apply for a dev job (co-op or otherwise) if you didn’t. That said, I’ve heard from other people that objectives make it easier to keep track of which position someone is actually applying for, which can be really handy if you don’t use an applicant tracking system and have a pile of resumes you’ve printed out. Basically, go ahead and include an objective if you want to, but don’t feel that you have to just because your teacher said so.

Job history is a tough one for students especially, I have two pieces of advice for you there. One, it is totally okay to have a projects section on your resume if you don’t have a lot of relevant work experience. Heck, even if you do have a lot of relevant work experience, if you have projects you’re proud of have a project section on your resume! Opinions differ on this one, but I think it’s perfectly fine to include school projects on your resume. What else are you supposed to do if you’re a student?

Two, you do not have to list every crummy summer job you’ve ever had. Especially if you took breaks from school to work to pay for your next semester, you do not have to use up half a page listing every retail/hospitality/whatever job you’ve ever had. If you took breaks from school to work it’s not a bad idea to explain that in your cover letter, but I’d much rather hear about cool projects from your classes than about stint #4 at $FastFoodPlace on your resume.

Readers, do you have any advice for students or anyone who doesn’t have years of dev experience to put on their resumes?